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During a recent press conference at the White House, First Lady Melania Trump announced a new initiative of her “Be Best” campaign, which she launched in 2018, during her husband’s first Administration. The original “Be Best,” which aimed to raise awareness about cyberbullying and other issues facing American children, was pilloried as a hypocritical project for the spouse of the country’s most powerful cyberbully. But its latest offshoot, “Fostering the Future,” which seeks to expand access to educational and employment opportunities for kids aging out of the foster-care system, has been received much more positively, as having great potential to aid the more than fifteen thousand young adults who exit the system each year without being reunified with their families or adopted. (Twenty per cent of them face youth homelessness upon leaving foster care, and only three per cent graduate from college.)

After President Donald Trump signed an executive order backing the “Fostering the Future” initiative, Bloomberg quoted the President boasting that his executive order would help foster youth become “wealthy, productive citizens.” And yet Bloomberg didn’t include what Trump said just before that phrase. In a rambling moment, the President addressed an aspect of his executive order that makes clear that the child-welfare system it promises looks awfully like the system of the past. “Faith-based non-profits are the nation’s most trusted institutions interacting with the foster-care system and practicing Christians and more. Think of this, more than twice as likely foster care, they’ll adopt the general population,” Trump said. “Yet radical left policies in states nationwide make it much harder, not easier, for those families to open up their homes,” he went on. “That’s why with the order that we’re doing today, we’re taking the ridiculous woke policies that discriminate against Christians and families of faith. As President I will always stand by us, we will stand by our country, and we will stand for religious liberty.”

Trump was alluding to language in the executive order that immediately set off alarm bells for me. The introduction seems to take issue with states and agencies requiring foster parents to affirm the gender identities and sexual orientations of the children in their care: “Some jurisdictions and organizations maintain policies that discourage or prohibit qualified families from serving children in need as foster and adoptive parents because of their sincerely-held religious beliefs or adherence to basic biological truths,” it reads. Later, the order decrees that the government must focus on “Maximizing Partnerships with Americans of Faith,” both by addressing policies that bar religious homophobia and transphobia against foster youth, and by taking “appropriate action to increase partnerships between agencies and faith-based organizations and houses of worship to serve families whose children have been placed in foster care or are at risk of being placed in foster care.”

Religious organizations already play a significant role in America’s child-welfare system—according to the Department of Health and Human Services, there are more than eight thousand faith-based foster-care and adoption agencies operating across the country. Trump’s order will protect the right of these organizations to receive federal funding, even if they work with foster parents who discriminate against queer and trans youth. This is devastating, given that L.G.B.T.Q.+ youth—among them, the children whose existence Trump’s order denies with its mention of “basic biological truths”—are overrepresented in the foster-care population.

Surveys have consistently found that L.G.B.T.Q.+ preteens and teen-agers, who make up about eleven per cent of the national population of that age group, by some estimates, account for about thirty per cent of foster-care populations. These kids often face rejection or harassment by their families, making them vulnerable to being placed in foster care, where they in turn are more likely to experience “victimization and abuse by social work professionals, foster parents, and peers, which has been shown to be related to a lack of permanency and poorer functional outcomes,” according to a 2019 study of youth in California, published in the medical journal Pediatrics. A 2020 survey of L.G.B.T.Q.+ foster youth in New York City found that they were more likely to be placed in group homes or residential care—most of them with no clinical reason to be there—than straight and cisgender foster youth. Residential treatment centers—intensive, restrictive institutions—are often rife with structural neglect; many residents report facing physical, sexual, and emotional abuse from poorly trained staff. In a 2025 Senate Finance Committee report on the experiences of L.G.B.T.Q.+ youth in residential treatment facilities, queer and trans youth described being punished for their identities. Some maltreatment was cloaked in religious teachings: one residential treatment facility tried to get a young person “to go to church” in response to their L.G.B.T.Q.+ identity, whereas another young person said that “homosexuality was a sin and punishable” in their facility.

L.G.B.T.Q.+ foster youth don’t just struggle within the system; they are among the most vulnerable of those preparing to transition out. (One of the many failures of residential treatment centers is that they also neglect to provide an appropriate education.) And yet the “Fostering the Future” initiative that aims to ease their transition out of the system is paired with efforts to put the religious rights of people who wish to foster above the civil rights of L.B.G.T.Q.+ youth. In this way, Trump’s executive order reënacts the original sin of America’s child-welfare system. For many years, the federal government failed to take responsibility for dependent children, creating a vacuum that would ultimately be filled by religious groups. By the time the government began providing substantial funding for states’ child protective services and foster-care programs, in the nineteen-sixties, religious charities—predominantly Protestant and Catholic ones—had been overseeing the out-of-home care of vulnerable children for centuries.

Since the start, there has been a gap between the good intentions of faith-based charities—spurred by religious belief to take care of the poor and vulnerable—and the actual effects on the children in their care. At the turn of the twentieth century, Progressive activists argued that orphanages—which were virtually all operated by religious charities—were heavily regimented, overcrowded spaces that isolated children from society and deprived them of the benefits of family care. Children were underfed, heavily worked, and educated foremost in the tenets of faith. At Catholic orphanages, physical and sexual abuse were also widespread, well into the twentieth century.

In 1950, foster care began to edge out religious orphanages. As states and the federal government gradually expanded the social safety net, religious groups fought to maintain their control, which came with access to government contracts. Speaking at a 1935 meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Charities, a bishop encapsulated this fight. “The poor belong to us,” he said. “We will not let them be taken from us!”

It’s no surprise, then, that some of the same religious groups are still practicing in the child-welfare space. And over the years, governments have occasionally excused instances of discrimination and unsavory practices so long as they are rooted in religious belief. In the nineteen-seventies in New York City, it was Black children who suffered. As the journalist Nina Bernstein explores in “The Lost Children of Wilder,” a twelve-year-old Black girl named Shirley Wilder was placed in a detention center for juvenile delinquents, in 1972, where she was sexually assaulted, because no foster-care agency would provide her with a home. This was due to a New York State law stipulating that child-welfare agencies had the right to “religious matching,” only serving children of their own “kind.” At the time, ninety per cent of all foster-care beds in the city were controlled by Catholic or Jewish charities. The city automatically assumed that all Black children were Protestant, and Catholic and Jewish charities routinely declined to care for them, although they made up more than half of the city’s foster-care population.

Wilder would become the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit brought against the city’s Human Resources Administration and private foster-care agencies, alleging that religious matching was unconstitutional. But the case never made it to trial because of judicial delays spurred in part by the court’s reluctance to challenge the primacy of religious charities in child welfare. Bernstein writes that the lawyer who filed the suit came to realize that while there was “no way, except in violation of the Constitution, that the city could fulfill a government obligation (child placement) by financing agencies whose mission was religious,” it was equally true that “no judge was going to come to the same conclusion, since that would mean dismantling the foster-care system.” In 1986, the city finally settled, agreeing to an arrangement in which children would be placed in foster care on a “first come, first served” basis, resolving the equal-protection issues.

Now it is the civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q.+ children that are at stake. The “Fostering the Future” order is not the first time Trump has jeopardized the well-being of queer and trans kids in foster care. During his first Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees foster care, allowed child-welfare agencies to claim religious exemptions to Obama-era non-discrimination rules that prohibited federal taxpayer-funded social-services agencies from discriminating on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. This waiver allowed federal funding to go to organizations such as South Carolina’s Miracle Hill Ministries, an evangelical agency which requires foster parents to sign a doctrinal statement of belief that includes “We believe God’s design for marriage is the legal joining of one man and one woman in a life-long covenant relationship.”

In 2021, President Joe Biden reversed course, denying waivers of nondiscrimination protections. And last year, H.H.S. took a step to guard the safety of L.G.B.T.Q.+ foster youth by passing a rule requiring state child-welfare agencies to implement specific processes insuring that such youth would be placed with foster-care providers who were trained to meet their needs, “and who would facilitate access to age-appropriate services to support their health and wellbeing.” The rule was stayed and then vacated, however, following a lawsuit by the state of Texas, where a Trump-appointed district judge characterized it as “requiring experimental and controversial treatment on our nation’s most vulnerable: children in foster care.” Under the current Administration, the Administration for Children and Families, the division of H.H.S. responsible for foster care, has also demanded that several states that currently require foster parents to be L.G.B.T.Q.+ affirming drop those requirements.

It remains to be seen if the “Fostering the Future” initiative will meaningfully help youth who age out of foster care in accessing education and employment—which they’ll now need to access SNAP assistance, since Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated an exemption that allowed former foster youth to receive food stamps for a sustained period without working or being enrolled in school. But we already know that allowing faith-based organizations to exercise hegemony in a foster-care system that costs more than thirty billion dollars a year in state, local, and federal dollars comes with its own consequences. ♦

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Daniyal Mueenuddin reads his story “The Golden Boy” from the December 1, 2025, issue of the magazine. Mueenuddin is the author of the story collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” which was published in 2009 and won both the Story Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His first novel, “This is Where the Serpent Lives,” from which this story was adapted, will be published in January.

“Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.” Thus begins “The Big Smoke,” Emily Hahn’s account of her journey from peppy globe-trotter to sallow lotus-eater (and back again) in nineteen-thirties Shanghai. This insouciant kickoff leaves you curious why Hahn went to China, of course, and why she was so keen on becoming an opium addict. More pressingly, it makes you wonder: Who is this lady? What else will this droll, naughty adventurer get up to?

Plenty. Along with fifty-two books, Hahn wrote more than two hundred articles for The New Yorker, over eight decades, about goings on in places as unalike as Rajasthan, Dar es Salaam, Hong Kong, and Rio de Janeiro. Her colleague Roger Angell described her, in an obituary from 1997, as “this magazine’s roving heroine” and “a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world.” (Angell’s mother, Katharine White, was Hahn’s editor, and when he was a twelve-year-old “boy naturalist” on East Ninety-third Street Hahn gave him a macaque. “Don’t let her bite you,” she advised. “If she does, bite her right back.”)

There was never an emergency when Hahn was at the wheel. (She was beautiful, which never hurts, and came from a well-to-do family of German Jews in St. Louis.) Her writing made great use of offhandedness. She was on her way to Congo in 1935 “to forget that my heart was broken; it was the proper thing to do in the circumstances.” In a “Letter from Brazil” from 1960, she casually mentions that her host “woke up one morning to find his pajamas spotted with blood; he had been bitten by a vampire bat.” She roamed the world, seemingly without fetter. “It had become clear to me on the first day in China that I was going to stay forever, so I had plenty of time,” she writes in “The Big Smoke.”

Initially, she wandered Shanghai, “pausing here and there to let a rickshaw or a cart trundle by,” vaguely aware of a scent “something like burning caramel,” which announced the use of opium, the way the stench of marijuana now tells of toking up in New York. Hahn became personally acquainted with the substance at the home of a man she calls Pan Heh-ven, who was later revealed to be her paramour, the married Chinese artist and poet Zau Sinmay. Time floated away as their circle of opium smokers talked and talked about art and literature and Chinese politics. (“That I knew nothing about politics didn’t put me off in the least,” Hahn recalls.)

With no sense of alarm, Hahn descends into dependence: her eyes leak, her skin turns jaundiced, and she stops going to the “night clubs, the cocktail and dinner parties beloved of foreign residents in Shanghai.” Inevitably, she finds herself reciting the addict’s creed: “I can stop any time.” But she doesn’t wish to stop, because “behind my drooping eyes, my mind seethed with exciting thoughts.”

The problem arises when opium starts interfering with Hahn’s wayfaring: it has become a mooring. “I couldn’t stay away from my opium tray, or Heh-ven’s, without beginning to feel homesick,” she writes—an unfamiliar, unwelcome feeling. She kicks the stuff with the help of a friend, who hypnotizes her and then keeps her away from her druggie boyfriend. Hahn’s description of detoxing: “I felt very guilty about everything in the world, but it was not agony. It was supportable.”

A child is another kind of anchor, and Hahn eventually had two of them, with the British officer Charles Boxer, who remained in Japanese internment in occupied Hong Kong when Hahn fled the island, in 1943. Motherhood seems not to have slowed her down much. After she returned to the United States with her two-year-old daughter—who spoke only Cantonese—Hahn discussed childhood anxiety with her pediatrician, a young doctor named Benjamin Spock. He asked if her daughter was ever happy. “When we go to Chinese restaurants,” Hahn replied, “where the waiters gather around to watch her eat with chopsticks. They talk to her, and she talks to them. Oh, she’s fine in Chinese restaurants.” Spock suggested that the girl might be reflecting the mother’s mood. Hahn dismissed him: “I’m perfectly all right. I’m just waiting for the war to finish, that’s all. Her father’s in prison camp.” ♦

Adventures in Opium

Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.

As girls, we may find it difficult to picture our mothers—especially if they are stern Caribbean mothers—as anything other than the poised ladies they’re so determined to mold us into. We struggle to imagine that they were ever little girls themselves, flying kites, climbing trees, playing hopscotch and marbles with their siblings. As mothers, some of us are so fearful for our daughters that we issue long lists of instructions that we hope will shield them from a hostile and menacing world. For mothers of Black girls, warnings about promiscuity are at the top of the list, to keep them from being considered “fast” and hypersexualized.

These tensions are brilliantly captured in Jamaica Kincaid’s breathless, single-sentence short story “Girl,” first published in the June 26, 1978, issue of The New Yorker. It was Kincaid’s first piece of fiction in the magazine, to which she already regularly contributed nonfiction, including many unsigned Talk of the Town pieces. In tight-knit communities like the one in Antigua where Kincaid—and, we assume, the mother and daughter in this story—grew up, reputation carries more weight than personal freedom, particularly for girls. The daughter, to whom a litany of instructions, or, rather, orders, are addressed, may yearn to sing benna, traditional Antiguan folk songs, in Sunday school, but she is likely better off, in her mother’s and the community’s perception, singing the traditional hymns of the Anglican Church. During my girlhood in Brooklyn, it was my father—who was a deacon in the Pentecostal church—who once told me that, of the four-hundred-plus members of the church we attended, there would always be at least one who was watching me. This was proved true when someone reported to my parents that I’d been seen eating sugarcane in the middle of Flatbush Avenue on a hot summer day. “Don’t eat fruits on the street,” the mother in “Girl” warns. “Flies will follow you.” Flies did not follow me, but someone’s gaze did, leading to a lengthy scolding from my mother.

“Girl,” as Kincaid acknowledged in a 2008 interview, is her most anthologized piece of writing. I first read it as a senior at Barnard College, not in this magazine but in an anthology of contemporary women writers. The story was taught both as a piece of “flash fiction” and, because of its refrain-like style, as a prose poem. I was not yet a mother then, and I read “Girl” as a daughter. I was grateful for the two moments in the story where the daughter speaks up to defend herself (“but I don’t sing benna on Sundays”), interruptions that allow her to be defiantly present in the way that daughters are in Kincaid’s later works, including her novels “Annie John,” “Lucy,” and “The Autobiography of My Mother.” In these books and others, the daughter never stops speaking, making one wonder what kinds of instructions, if any, she will pass on to her own children.

The mother, though, is not only trying to tame a shrew (“the slut you are so bent on becoming”); she is offering a template for survival. When I was fifteen, my mother sent me to take cooking and etiquette classes from a Haitian neighbor in our building. That same woman taught embroidery to twentysomethings who were working on their trousseaux—frilly tablecloths and bedsheets for their future homes with their husbands. When I first read “Girl,” I thought of it as a trousseau of words. The mother’s advice addresses everything from personal grooming to cleaning house and gardening to how to behave with friends and strangers and how to make medicine both for a cold and “to throw away a child.” The daughter indicates with her rebuttals that she will pick and choose what to keep and what to ignore. The mother’s parting words concern “how to make ends meet,” which is, after all, one of life’s defining challenges, and how to choose bread, a kind of nourishment that someone else still controls: “always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh.” “But what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?” the daughter wonders. To the mother, this is a rejection of all that came before. “You mean to say,” she exclaims, “that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” ♦

Girl

“This is how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways.”

On a Friday evening in October, 2021, the Justice Department launched into damage-control mode. The Attorney General, Merrick Garland, the Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, and other senior officials gathered on an emergency conference call to decide how to deal with what they considered out-of-line remarks from President Joe Biden.

Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, had defied a subpoena from the House select committee investigating January 6th. Committee members were weighing whether to refer Bannon to the Justice Department for prosecution. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, had ducked commenting on a matter of such delicacy. “That would be up to the Department of Justice, and it would be their purview to determine,” she told reporters. “They’re independent.” But Biden, asked by the CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins whether he thought those who ignored subpoenas should face contempt charges, didn’t mince words. “I do, yes,” he said.

As Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis report in their new book, “Injustice,” those three words so alarmed Garland and his team that they felt compelled to issue a statement effectively rebuking their boss. Just fifty-one minutes after Biden’s comments, the department’s chief spokesman, Anthony Coley, released this deliberately tart comment: “The Department of Justice will make its own independent decisions in all prosecutions based solely on the facts and the law. Period. Full stop.”

Compare this with the reaction of another Department of Justice, on another fall Friday, four years later, to a Presidential directive that was far more pointed. “Now that the Democrats are using the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans, to try and deflect from their disastrous SHUTDOWN, and all of their other failures, I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “All arrows,” he wrote, are “pointing to the Democrats.”

This time, the answer from the Attorney General was not full stop; it was full speed ahead. “Thank you, Mr. President,” Bondi replied on X, as if grateful for the assignment. Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, would “take the lead,” she assured Trump. William Barr, Bondi’s predecessor during Trump’s first term, was driven to complain publicly that the President’s frequent tweets about pending cases “make it impossible for me to do my job.” Bondi takes instant obedience to Trump’s social-media edicts as her job description.

A challenge of covering Trump’s Washington is to guard against being worn down by the unceasing flow of aberrant behavior, one politically motivated and factually deficient investigation after another. But, until the announcement of Clayton’s probe, Trump’s Justice Department at least engaged in the flimsy pretense that it was investigating crimes—that there was some basis (“predication,” in the language of the D.O.J.) for F.B.I. agents and prosecutors to be rooting around in the actions of the President’s political enemies. Trump’s prosecution by social media, and Bondi’s eager compliance, cross yet another line once thought inviolable.

Not only is this behavior not normal; it is also, as is becoming increasingly clear, self-defeating. Experienced, ethical prosecutors want to have nothing to do with political prosecutions. That leaves such cases in the inexperienced hands of attorneys like Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer named by Trump to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, after his initial pick for that job, Erik Siebert, balked at bringing mortgage-fraud charges against New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. So it was that Halligan found herself appearing for the first time before a grand jury, racing against a statute-of-limitations deadline to file false-statements charges against the former F.B.I. director James Comey. Last Monday, a federal magistrate judge, citing a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps,” granted the “extraordinary remedy” of giving Comey access to grand-jury materials. These are ordinarily secret, but the judge said that Halligan had made “fundamental misstatements of the law that could compromise the integrity of the grand jury process.”

The judge’s order is partially redacted, but Halligan appears to have misled the grand jurors about Comey’s constitutional right not to testify. The judge also found that, as grand jurors wrestled with whether there was adequate evidence against Comey, Halligan “clearly suggested” that “they did not have to rely only on the record before them to determine probable cause but could be assured the government had more evidence—perhaps better evidence—that would be presented at trial.” This is not how prosecutions work. Grand juries aren’t instructed to issue indictments in the hope that the government produces more proof down the road. Halligan filed an emergency appeal, but her seeming incompetence could doom the case against Comey. On Wednesday, the district judge hearing the case, Michael Nachmanoff, questioned Halligan about whether the indictment was valid if all the grand jurors had not approved the final version—something that she acknowledged, but then later denied.

In the end, it took just two days for Trump to shift from decrying the “Epstein Hoax” to backing a House move to order the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. No matter that he had just gone to extreme lengths to pressure lawmakers to vote against the measure. No matter that he didn’t need to wait for congressional action; he could order the release on his own. This was a humiliating about-face of the sort we’re not used to seeing from the President, but it reflected Trump’s bowing to the inexorable political arithmetic: a single Republican House member, Clay Higgins, of Louisiana, voted against the bill, and the Senate passed it with unanimous consent and sent it to Trump, who signed it. Despite that lopsided vote, the documents may not be so quickly forthcoming; the Justice Department could seek to invoke the investigation that Trump ordered up to avoid releasing the files. The Republican-controlled Congress may be showing stirrings of independence, however belated. But the President can take solace in the knowledge that he still has the subservient Attorney General of his dreams. ♦

I’m Donut ?, a Japanese bakery chain known for its viral popularity and its curiously punctuated name, opened earlier this year in a sleek Times Square storefront. The company’s specialty is the nama doughnut (the word, in Japanese, means “raw,” or “fresh”), an impossibly moist and light cumulus of starch and sugar that seems captured by gravity thanks only to the marginal heft of various frostings, icings, and fillings. This textural sorcery is achieved by way of a proprietary yeasted dough whose recipe involves, among other things, kabocha squash, which introduces a bit of earthy sweetness and gives the interiors a sunny yellow hue. The brand’s “original” doughnut, a sugar-dusted, circular pillow without a hole in the center, is something of a miracle—breathy, yeasty, tender, and warm, it was the dream doughnut I didn’t realize I had always yearned for.

These miracles don’t come without sacrifice—of one’s time, mostly, but also of one’s money, since the more ambitiously stuffed and decorated selections can exceed ten dollars apiece. Still, the New York location of I’m Donut ? is a bona-fide sensation, even months after its début. The shop, aggressively minimal, with a soaring blank-white façade that evokes the attenuated minimalism of an Apple Store, is the chain’s first outside of Japan, where the brand originated in 2022. Depending on the day, the time, and the weather, you might waltz right in or join a snaking queue of a hundred people alternately wondering if the wait is worth it, gazing up at the “Oh, Mary!” marquee across the street, and enthusiastically filming vertical videos about the phenomenon of the line itself.

Savory options include a doughnut-encased B.L.T.

You should get the original doughnut, of course, not just for its own virtues but as a control. There are chocolate and matcha variants, their subtle flavors baked into the dough. Then there are filled doughnuts, whose puffy centers are pumped with flavored creams, all of them vivid and none too sweet: custard, more matcha, fragrant sake gelée with Chantilly, airy peanut-butter cream swirled with tart Concord-grape jelly. There are some New York-exclusive flavors, like a ring doughnut glazed in neon-pink strawberry icing, freckled with bits of freeze-dried berry that crackle and melt on the tongue, or a chocolate variety with a caramel-espresso cream filling that was unexpectedly, thrillingly bitter and complex. The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory. I loved it unreservedly, though I imagine I might be in the minority.

I’m Donut ? doughnuts are, in short, excellent, but, as with so many places that achieve extraordinary viral velocity, what the store is really selling is the experience of experience, the novelty of novelty. Call it hype as infrastructure: the stanchions corralling the line outside, the security guard at the door, the smiling employees walking up and down the queue, handing out checklist-style paper menus to speed the flow of orders. This is far from the first international chain to open in the city, but it’s one of the few that’s broken through to become genuinely hot while maintaining considerable good will.

A matcha doughnut with a matcha filling.

What do New Yorkers want in a chain from elsewhere? We will cheer the arrival of Juici Patties, a Jamaican fast-food joint that launched several locations this year, right around the same time that folks started trying their first nama doughnuts. We’ll line up for the first American Sanku Maots’ai, a hot-pot restaurant originating in Chengdu whose recently opened East Village storefront is one of four-thousand-plus outposts, and buzz is already buzzing for the imminent Canal Street opening of Mixue Ice Cream & Tea, a Chinese chain with more stores worldwide than McDonald’s. Heck, there was a ribbon-cutting for the city’s first location of the Taiwanese dumpling juggernaut Din Tai Fung. But when Raising Cane’s, a Louisiana chicken-fingers operation that really does have a fantastic signature dipping sauce, arrived here in 2023, it became a punch line, an avatar of the strip-mall-ification of the city.

Some of this has to do with the essential internationality of New York: for better or worse, we are a city more concerned with the rest of the world than with the rest of America. But a chain’s reception is also shaped by whether it manages to transcend its chain-ness, to become a totemic evocation of culture, or place, or social-media clout. I’m Donut ? seems to have at least nailed the last part of this equation, though its reputation could very well shift once everyone has got their photo and moved on to the next new thing. The distinction between a welcome import and an intrusive one is, perhaps, only the story we tell ourselves to justify standing in line for a doughnut that we now believe we’ve been looking for all our lives. ♦